I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them.
[0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)
Finding people who serve on carriers shouldn't be difficult. That kind of information can be plastered anywhere over FB or similar. Many of their friends will also be active in similar roles.
Then find associated Strava accounts. Find more friends that way.
The information you can gather is useful on many fronts. Someone does a few runs a week on shore and then suddenly stops? Could be injury, could be that carrier has sailed. Have many of their "friends" who also serve there also stopped logging things on dry land? Do any of them accidentally log a run out in the open ocean? This kind of patchy unreliable information is the mainstay for old-school style espionage.
Strava Labs beta "Flybys" site used to be a great source for stalkers. You could upload a GPS track (which can easily be faked in terms of both location and timestamps) and see who was running/riding/etc nearby around that same time. The outcry was enough that it was switched to being opt-in (in 2020 I think) but for a while all of the data was laid bare for people to trawl and misuse.
At one time I guessed that too, but I've heard navy people explain that it's actually pretty effective. Imagine saying 'pretty hard to hide in North America from a satellite' - it's actually not hard because the area is so large; there aren't live images of the entire area and someone needs to examine them. Oceans are an order of magnitude larger.
A significant element of security for naval ships is hiding in the ocean. US aircraft carrier planes have a ~500 mi effective radius without refueling; even if you see a plane, all you know is that the ship might be in a ~3,142 square mile area. And remember that to target them, you need a precise target and the ships tend to be moving.
With ML image recognition at least some of that security is lost. Also, the Mediterranean is smaller than the oceans, but the precision issue applies. And we might guess that countries keep critical areas under constant surveillance - e.g., I doubt anything sails near the Taiwan Strait without many countries having a live picture.
pi*(500 miles)^2 = 785,400 sq. miles.
That explains the downvotes!
https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
Precise location, yes. At least in the US Navy this is an important part of the carrier's protection. (Having destroyers between the carrier and potential threats is another.)
Clouds. (Radar sats can see through clouds but can also be jammed.)
But even on a clear day, most of the people looking to target a carrier these days (Iran/hamas etc) don't have their own satellites. But a real-time GPS position accurate to few meters? That could be tactically useful to anyone with a drone.
An active fitness tracker might also give away the ship's readiness state, under the assumption that people aren't going to be doing much jogging while at battle stations.
It's probably safe to say they have been destroyed, jammed, or spoofed since the war started.
So please don't make unlikely claims up without any evidence.
What makes you say that? Iran is a country twice the size of Texas, and dismantling the military-industrial complex of a massive country takes time and money. Iran was outed as a paper tiger last summer, and hasn't been able to meaningfully defend their airspace, navy, or commanders. They are being absolutely destroyed. The question is whether this will be sufficient to cause regime change before the country is sent back to the stone age like Gaza.
Everything I posted already refutes that. What are you even doing?
Specifically, wikipedia suggests Russia has a grand total of 3 such satellites.
https://defence-blog.com/russia-is-jamming-european-space-ag...
Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.
“BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities.
[…]
Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense
[…]
Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
- do you think nation-states have the same commercial relationship with the ultimate sources of their satellite imagery as the general public? To me that makes about as much sense as thinking that Facebook won't reveal your private messages to specific governments because they won't reveal them to some third-party advertiser.
- do you think nation-states that are your opponents would be getting their services from commercial image providers that are loyal to you? The American companies you list are far from the only ones on the planet that provide satellite imagery as a service.
You can damage or sink an ordinary ship with a bombing, like what happened to the USS Cole, but a carrier will have a fleet escorting them.
It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).
A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it will do so with horns blaring.
Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.
Am I supposed to believe we live in a world where this exists, yet carriers are impossible to find and track on the sea?
Besides, modern fighter jets have radars with 400km detection ranges against fighter sized targets.
A dozen of them or more specialized sensor aircraft could cover entire conflict zones.
It's possible to go to the moon, launch ICBMs, and make fusion bombs. It's news when something possible gets cheap and easy. It's also newsworthy when one of the most powerful and expensive weapon platforms in history doesn't have its infosec buttoned down.
Well, peace makes you sloppy. No one is at war with France right now, and no one is realistically going to attack this ship.
If we were fighting WW3, you can bet sailors wouldn't be allowed to carry personal cellphones at all. Back in WW2, even soldier's letters back home had to be approved by the censors.
Would it just be virtue signaling, or is there more to it?
[0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1
[1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...
Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.
Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm their shape optically, paint them for missiles, and take the disconnection/destruction of any one of them as an indication of possible activity and automated retasking? It's a scary world to be a slow-moving vehicle, these days.
And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.
Taking out a billion dollar asset with a couple million dollars worth of drones and a few (more expensive) anti ship missles? Priceless.
You're off by at least an order of magnitude. The camera mount you'd have to put on such a drone would cost about that much, probably more.
You're also vastly underestimating just how big the ocean actually is.
And finding the aircraft carrier is not the penultimate step to destroying it (a "few" anti shipping missiles aren't getting through those defenses).
High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites Are Ready for Launch (2023)
Editor's note: [ ... ] Airbus contacted Proceedings to note that the 2016 pricing estimates were correct at the time but that the company will be releasing new, lower estimates soon.
Zephyr – down but definitely not out (2022)
After an astounding 64 days aloft and a travelling a total more than 30,000nm, a British-built solar-powered UAV crashed just hours before it was due to break the ultimate world endurance record.
The aircraft was the British-built solar-powered Airbus Zephyr UAV – one of a new breed of HAPS (high altitude, pseudo-satellites) – a new category of UAVs that are aiming for zero-emission, ultra-long- endurance flight as a kind of terrestrial satellite – able to loiter in the stratosphere for weeks or months at a time to monitor borders, watch shipping, relay communications or conduct atmospheric science.
Aside from the hostile drone command and launch being found and destroyed, the drone itself would either be shot down by a missile or disabled by a direct energy weapon.
If the drone were to fault on it's own and was designed to float, it will be expensive to retreive it. Cheaper at scale to launch the sensors into orbit or deploy bouys.
Hundreds of cheap drones would have negligible impact on a modern warship's integrity. An aircraft carrier is designed to have an actual airplane crash into it and continue operating. These boats still have armor. It's not purely an information war.
It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?
Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking.
> It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work.
Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.
We saw how from the Houthis and US military: You send a helicopter with a few dudes with guns. Marine vessels are unarmed, including the people on board. They can't fight off or run from the helicopter.
If for whatever reason that's not an option, you shoot it with the 5inch gun on a destroyer. Maybe a warning shot across the bow first. Maybe you literally ram it with the destroyer if you are feeling weird, as China and Venezuela have done. Awkwardly, when Venezuela did that, they rammed a vessel that just so happens to be reinforced for ice breaking, so the warship was damaged and the cruise ship was not really.
https://www.badassoftheweek.com/stanislav-petrov-and-the-rcs...
> Don't ram the ship that has two bars and a Jacuzzi on board and is designed for, like, smashing glaciers. Mm hmm. Then the captain of the Resolute radioed to the guys in the water like, 'Hey, do you want some help?'
Heh.
The CIWS is radar guided.
Faking GPX tracks can be done in a text editor.
There are very few attack modes which are enabled by this. The ship is a giant slow moving metallic object. You just need to get relatively close. Guidance will easily do the rest.
The real problem is not seeing the instantaneous location of the ship. It's being able to draw a line on a map such that you know it's likely destination and time of arrival.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.
I don't know either, must be more than 24 though because it's still dark as shit down there.
But joking apart, almost everything is connected and calling home these days...
Russian units have requested fire support via telegram.
Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square paths on the map. Yes, it was Americans jogging just inside the perimeter of small bases.
Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...
Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...
Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.
We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.
Imagine this data going to a burglar, who has a digital dashboard of nearby one-person properties and when the owner is likely to be out, able to act with confidence they can leave before the victim could return.
Sure, sophisticated international hitmen won't have any interest in catching you in ambush... but that doesn't make you safe from a local rapist of opportunity.
In Western Europe there are also foreign burglar gangs that go on sprees for a few weeks. They're well organised but don't have time to do the stalking. They use publicly available data as much as they can.
Most of us, but for those that are...
However, in the world we live in today, the various LEOs are using this type of data to find people they do not like. It's getting to the point that I pine for the days of good ol' 1985 where you could just be another anonymous person in public with no tracking of your every move.
a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.)
b) Sharing and socialising some other activities.
You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes.
Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.
Here's a few examples that might help demonstrate my point:
I used to do parkrun regularly. I had no problem sharing my Strava activities for parkrun because me doing it wasn't a secret, nor was the location secret, nor was my time secret. All of these things could be found from the parkrun website once the results had come up. John Doe was at this location at 9am and ran this route with 400 others in a time of 26 minutes or whatever.
I was also part of a cycling club that did a regular "club run" on a Sunday. 5-15 of us all doing the same route. It was good for club morale for us all to upload our rides to help show how popular it was and encourage other club members to come along. They could see that we weren't going at a silly pace and that we stopped regularly to regroup as we had riders of all abilities and speeds riding with us.
But then I also helped out with my kids running club at school, taking a bunch of 7-11 year old's on a 20 minute jog/run (depending on how quick they were) around the local area. This absolutely should not appear on Strava (public or not). The running club wasn't a secret (everyone at the school knew since they had the option of letting their kid do it) but that's a whole world of difference from having it public on Strava showing the usual start time, the various routes we used to take, where we stopped, etc. Privacy zones can help hide the start/end but that wouldn't help hide everything.
We just made sure that all of the parents who helped out knew that we shouldn't even record it with their smartwatch. I just used to create a manual entry of "Morning run" with approximate distance and time. That was good enough for my training stats.
There's no one privacy setting that handles all of this. Whatever setting you use relies on me to manually adjust the activities that don't fit that setting. The problem is that humans are fallible, so remembering to make it private or hide the location data isn't entirely reliable. You're also at the mercy of Strava (or whatever) not doing something stupid and accidentally making private data visible due to some bug, glitch or leak.
But at least that's a failure you can fix once you notice, as opposed to making something public that shouldn't have been. Letting people opt in to automatically sharing runs to the public just seems like something designed to get people to share stuff without thinking about it.
Maybe "automatically share everything to the globe" should just not be an option for sensitive data like this.
Which is weird, because if they bought a Garmin device, they already have all that built in.
The social stuff is nice though.
Genuinely weird to make statements like "they already have all that built in" if you don't even know what Strava provides, don't you think?
I have the family exercise group on mute, lol
The British noticed that V1s aimed at London tended to fall a little short. This would have been to the South and East of London since that's the direction they were coming from. They reported more hits on the North West of the city, expecting correctly that Nazi spies in Britain would let the Luftwaffe know about this.
So the range was decremented further, meaning even more hits on the southern and eastern suburbs, but statistically fewer people killed and buildings destroyed as the mean moved to less populated areas.
Tinder provided 1-mile granularity, so OPFOR would roam around until they had enough points to locate the headquarters. Then, they'd artillery it out of existence. The brigade commander was most displeased—moving a brigade headquarters is not for the weak or fainthearted.
It's not like one needs to really poison the system given that AI enthusiasts are copypasting their own AI generated contented back into it anyway. Maybe not responsible AI believers who used it responsibly etc etc, but there's many more people who don't and who have access to the tools to add their slop pollution.
I am curious how future models get trained given that publicly available user generated content may no longer be reliable.
It's not queer if you're tied to the pier
One of my favorite examples are the soldiers who leaked classified information to win arguments on online forums [1]. Similar incidents have occurred with a Minecraft Discord [2].
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65354513
[2]: https://www.ign.com/articles/how-classified-pentagon-documen...
And are you also aware of the mystery weapon in Venezuela, which clearly corroborated the story? [2]
[1] https://youtu.be/C1jmAj9OUOs
[2] https://www.rusi.org/news-and-comment/in-the-news/did-us-dep...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Established in the 60s so it was kept pretty secret for a long period of time.
It's interesting to think that the government has been using technology to watch us for awhile but now thanks to ubiquitous networks, cheap internet, phone and apps like tinder and strava and a bit of ingenuity, we can watch back. :)
Not so fun fact, the UnaBomber was one of the subjects of that program and it is said that his personality changed drastically afterwards. Note his wiki page doesn't call out MKULTRA or government links by name...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/12/the-unabomber-the-ci...
There are some who claim the dirision associated with the term Conspiracy theory is in fact a Conspiracy..
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
> There are some who claim the dirision associated with the term Conspiracy theory is in fact a Conspiracy..
Haha, that's entertaining. I've heard of quite a few stories, some proven, that CIA or similar agencies were fabricating evidence and bribing people to _create_ conspiracy theories. I believe one such case was a diary discovered related to "Richard E. Byrd's North Pole Flight". If I recall correctly the person that found it later admitted that he was bribed or coerced to do so. I can't look up sources now, might try and look it up later today.
It makes sense. If conspiracies are leaking, you can create fake leaks and then discredit them. Shaming and marginalization is great too.
Another instance is one darknet market being taken down by Dutch police. They were also in full control of the next biggest market where they knew everyone would flee to, and they spent some time monitoring all comms on that second site before intervening.
Then, because "someone's leaked classified data on War Thunder again!!!" is a standard story that you can publish with zero effort and get lots of clicks on, people post formulaic articles about it. But it's nothing that would be of any use at all to actual spies, they can just go on the internet and read the manuals themselves. Nothing like as spectacular as the actual classified leaks, which were incredible but have not been anywhere near as common as people think based on reporting.
Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.
Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.
Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.
Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.
Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and
A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.
B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.
We are not talking about stealth vehicles.
Not all of them.
For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region. There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering with that frequency and resolution. Once you know approximately where it is or even where it was in the semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and build a track off the location and course.
The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict.
Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship.
Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.
And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel.
So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.
I was just saying that stealth is a component of ship design for small crafts (i.e. those that would generally stay close to the coast) but that it's not the case for larger ships and even for those smaller ships it's just not the primary purpose for radar optimized hulls.
Close to the coast, non-coastal radar won't be able to detect ships nearly as well as out at sea where they stand out like a sore thumb. And of course coastal radar will still light up any ship so stealth there is of little value on foreign shores.
But really outside of some niche cases for small crafts, radar "stealth" is all about survivability and not the traditional view of stealth.
TLDR I think we are pretty much in agreement.
https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/
(of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)
So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.
And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
(of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)
It did not say if it had acted at the request of US authorities.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hol...
So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely to be, and scan that area.
Doesn't matter whether Estonia, Honduras, Laos, and Luxembourg can track their carrier, or not.
EDIT: In confined waters (like the Mediterranean), many more countries could track the carrier if they cared to. Even back in the 1950's, the Soviets got quite adept at loading "fishing boats" with electronic equipment, then trailing behind US Navy carrier groups.
That's why satellites use radars and scientific instrumentation magnetometers to find stuff like ships or even subs underwater.
I mean fuck, I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too and just look there for the carrier. If I can't find the carrier there, then I can plot the course between France and hormuz and do a brute force search over that course taking into account such a ship's relative velocity, since it's not like the carrier is gonna zig-zag through south america and the north pole on its way there to avoid detection. Is what I'm saying something sci-fi?
Seems to have come as a shock to the US government.
Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.
Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.
Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you.
A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
> I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification.
However, aircraft carriers are big, so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.
tl;dr: Radar works very well for this.
This is why the Zumwalt and other low observable designs are going back to roughly tumblehome hulls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#/media...
If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns. They aren't the magic cannon it was designed for but do they really not fit? Apparently we are now putting hypersonic missiles in those mounts instead.
Can't exactly make a Carrier that shape though.
They're putting hypersonics on it because they've got 3 hulls and might as well get some value out of them, but not because it's what you'd design for from scratch.
The Zumwalt program was dumb from day 1. It was driven by elderly people on the congressional arms committees that have romantic notions of battleships blasting it out.
The reality is since the development of anti ship missiles, sitting off the coast and plinking at someone is suicidal, even if you have stealth shaping and uber guns of some sort.
It was a DoA mission concept.
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
EDIT: the sibling comment already provided a high quality answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47458766
Just do a youtube search and you'll find plenty of talking head explainer videos. Ignore the talking head and just look at the imagery and data they share.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc is a good overview of what's up there so far, and what's coming as they really try to scale the technology.
Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this. SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that.
I would think that medium and high orbit optical tracking (daytime, cloudless sky) is probably used, because with video you can reasonably track subpixel targets if they're high contrast, without a lot of data transmission requirements.
I'm not sure why you assume this, this is factually incorrect. Satellite based SAR has been successfully used for civilian ship detection applications (traffic management, illegal fishing, smuggling detection, etc) for over three decades. I am sure its military use goes back much further.
> SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that.
No? SAR satellites take thousands of SAR images of stationary scenes every day. It's true that object motion in the scene introduces artifacts, specifically displacement from true position - this is often called the "train off track" phenomenon, as a train moving at speed when viewed with SAR from the right angle will look like it's driving through the adjacent field rather than on the track. However, this isn't a significant problem, and can actually be useful in some situations (eg: looking at how far a ship is deflected from its wake to estimate its speed).
I feel like there must be people at NRO whi are dedicated to sub tracking via satellite.
And the problems are definitely a lot more interesting.
For the first one, just look at wikipedia lists of government says that fly as little triangular constellations, like Yaogan 9A, 9B, 9C on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan
Those are ELINT birds that use multilateration to spot emitters globally.
SAR can spot wakes far, far, larger than ships using the same techniques as SAR measuring ground erosion, etc.
[0] https://x.com/hwtnv/status/2031326840519041114 [1] https://sentiwiki.copernicus.eu/__attachments/1672913/Revisi...
5-10 ships moving at speed across the ocean. Blasting the skies with radar.
Its as easy as anything is to find it in the ocean. And were pretty damn good at tracking ships at sea even small fishing vessels let alone a floating city.
The threat model to CSGs are basically nuclear submarines from nations that would simply tail the group if needed.
Aircraft carriers sail from home ports and are frequently visible to all. The Charles de Gaulle was previously in Denmark for instance, then obviously everyone can also see you crossing the English Channel and Straight of Gibraltar.
So from there it is only a matter of keeping an eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys' capital ships are.
I just ran some googled numbers over my envelope, and I get that the Mediterranean sea (great circle distance between Gibraltar and Beirut is 2300mi) is about 14000x larger than the bow-to-stern length (858') of the carrier.
That's... not that terribly difficult as an imaging problem. Just a very tractable number of well-resolved 12k phone camera images would be able to bullseye it.
Obviously there are technical problems to be solved, like how to get the phones into the stratosphere on a regular basis for coverage, and the annoyance of "clouds" blocking the view. So it's not a DIY project.
But it seems eminently doable to me. The barriers in place are definitely not that the "empty space is just too big". The globe is kinda small these days.
In this case, for example, the French Government publicly announced where it's going.
"Upon closer inspection, the neural network is just scraping public information from the French Ministry of Defense"
Or does getting told by Russia count?
It's like Christmas. Real practice tracking US assets and wargaming against them is such a break for them.
But don't you dare suggest that hanging a portrait of Putin in the White House is inappropriate, or a Republican might get mad.
They probably lack the ability to figure out which specialists are on board.
It was patrolling ~100km below Cyprus's main southern city.
Move the timeline to yesterday, find a non-Boeing military plane in that zone, enable flight traces and keep trying planes until you see an ovoidal pattern circling around "nothing"... but that nothingness moves over time.m; that's the ship.
No need to go that far. Macron did press conferences in Cyprus and on the Charles de Gaulle. You just need a passing glance at the headlines of a French newspaper. Or any decent international news channel (granted, that’s a bit tricky in the US).
Turning off AIS while allowing civilian traffic is incredibly risky, and creating a huge no-fly zone in the Med is politically tricky.
[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/16/americas/venezuela-near-c...
Now that's not realtime because I'm telling you after the fact. But if you were paid to do it, of course, then you'd spend some money on an actual account on this and similar services, which would get you many more filters and much more precise data.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
Surely that's missing a 0 or are carriers really that fast?
Boeing 777 speed 554mph[2]
So about 16x!
It's like when you drive your car you're not normally redlining it since that will kill the engine if you do it all the time.
27*16=432, a 777 goes 510-520 knots.
So maybe more like 18-19x.
For the carriers it is at least as the true top speed is classified.
Look at the globe some day from that angle and compare it to the Mediterranean.
Some bits ended up on a beach of the Réunion island, closer to Madagascar than Sri Lanka. I am not disagreeing, it’s just that the whole story is fascinating. It’s easy to think "well, it just crashed into the sea so of course some bits would show up on a beach" until you look at the Indian Ocean with a proper projection and figure the scale.
And furthermore identifiable information of a particular individual, which people can use to for example find out what unit he is deployed with, which may give you information about what the mission is about and so on.
In WW2 when transmitting morse code individual operators used to have what was called a 'fist', skilled listeners could identify and track operators by their unique signature. This was used during world war 2 to track where particular individuals and units were moved which gave people a great deal of information not just where but what they were up to.
If you leak the Fitbit information of a guy who foreign intelligence has identified as being part of a unit that's always involved in particular operations you didn't just give something obvious away but potentially something very sensitive.
I think people tend to lack imagination about how some piece of intel could be used by an adversary.
Not everyone can use spy satellites, and even if we're only talking about nation-states, many (most?) countries do not have spy satellites.
So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
Detailed maps of military and other sensitive areas have been created through run maps from fitness watches[0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.
This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.
The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.
Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.
Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up).
Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.
With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.
Any system that is based on the perfection of humans is doom from the start ..
A jammer is easy and very effective, you can even use it at home to piss off your neighbor, so I guess the army can do it too;
then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location
not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself
imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible
However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS
I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though
The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm
A global "Private mode" switch that sends zero data about anything at all while it is enabled. Your runs stay on device. All network calls are rejected. No data saved with it enabled will ever leave the device, full stop.
Every single app in the world should have this. It should be an OS setting that forces network calls to fail as well as part of the app review process that no data generated during a private session can ever leave the device.
They don't do that because they like your data for money.
but once you start using the Strava app the point is socializing activity, otherwise why bother?
Strava privacy zones actually work, well as long as the location isn't physically moving by itself, lol
hope the sailor didn't get into too much trouble if it was innocent enough
.jpg){kind=link}
As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the
waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink
satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold
crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without
the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times
story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security
risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene,
that it is hard to believe.
The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew
better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy
intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration
with a concentration in information security and digital management,
according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at
court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme.
Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking
questions about it. Some of these questions came to Marrero directly, but she
denied knowing anything about the network… and then privately changed its
Wi-Fi name to “another moniker that looked like a wireless printer—even
though no such general-use wireless printers were present on the ship, the
investigation found.”
1. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unau...
I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.
I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles
Random tracklog example: https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:mattmozza/2...
(zoom in until you see circles on the track line)
23: The ground beneath the runner's feet has stable lat/lon.
I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?
Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures?
Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration?
Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?
Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track.
I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.
And why would a Le Monde 'journalist' dox his 'buddy' and expose and thus endanger the ship? Anything for a click?
I'm sure someone in the tech team is getting questioned on this.
> Strava also made it (in 2019) so you'd need at least N samples for it to be visible
Presumably you're talking about the Global Heatmap? This used to be updated only annually. Is it more real-time now?
Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-...
https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...
how is a submarine commander committing war crimes?
by the same way of thinking, it would be completely justified for people from many countries to show up at random US service members houses and shoot them in the street , or perhaps attack their embassies, commit suicide bombings...
I said nothing about whether it was justified, simply noted the state of reality in which you should probably avoid doing harmful things to others if you would like to not motivate them to harm you in return. Americans would absolutely benefit from doing fewer things to harm other countries if they would like to be targeted by fewer terrorists.
Though if your local UN security council member is known for committing war crimes then you probably shouldn't serve in its military.
News reports from both Russia and Ukraine stated he was the commander of K-148 Krasnodar, a submarine that at the time of his command engaged in missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.
From a BBC article:
> Ukrainian media has said he could have been in command of the vessel when it carried out a missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia in July 2022, which killed 28 people, including three children.
Also, it's clear that a military officer is obviously a legitimate military target in a war.
Former
According to reports, he was the commander of the submarine when it was conducting bombing missions on civilian targets in Ukraine.
What possibly compels you to believe your "former" qualifier has any relevance?
It is eerie how closely the American mentality parallels that of the German regime. "The Nazis entered this war on the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody and nobody was going to bomb them."
We are facing a far greater calamity than I get the sense most really have any understand for. Effectively all international institutions have exposed themselves as some variation of incompetent, shams, husks, utterly ineffectual, and even downright evil (e.g., condemning Iran essentially for being attacked) because the subordinated, pathetic vassal dungeon gimp countries and institutions are afraid and/or seek continued favor and the approval of their suzerain master/King.
The Nuremberg trials were a glorified kangaroo court, so obviously a sham that even a US Supreme Court justice voiced their opposition. They made a mockery of the concept of law, trying people for laws that did not exist at the time the alleged crimes were committed, and more to the point, even for war crimes that the US and Allies themselves also committed and did not prosecute themselves for. The concept of "war crimes" has never been anything more than a thin veil over winner's justice, dressed up nice and pretty to seem less barbaric. And, to be fair, the Nazis were unfathomably barbaric and earned barbaric treatment - I doubt many would particularly object to summary execution of high-ranking Nazis after the war. But the US turned its retribution into a massive propaganda coup about international justice, upon which it placed itself as the ruler of.
The US, of course, exempted itself from international justice. Ever. Not only does it not punish its own war criminals, it refuses to ratify any treaties like participation in the ICC that would give international accountability to its own soldiers for war crimes, and even further still, it signed into law an act that authorizes the invasion of the Netherlands if an American were ever to be tried at the Hague. Whatever you thought international justice was, for your entire life, has been a propaganda-laden sham. It never existed. The only thing that ever existed was winner's justice. The winners kill the losers at their pleasure. That's all it ever was. In the sense that there's a calamity, it's not because of the collapse of any international institutions, because they were always an illusion made to benefit the powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
Also, even Trump himself, when asked about the possibility of Iran conducting attacks on US soil, stated the following:
> "Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die."
So what point do you think you're making?
The problem humanity now faces is that one side in this conflict is extremely psychopathic and narcissistis that will do anything and everything to retain control and power.
People may want to kill you for different reasons though. No need to commit any crimes.
It is why after the U.S. kills or captures some foreign leader, they brag about figuring out their routes and daily habits. It is not a stretch to say that it could also be done, and probably has before, in the U.S.
Extreme penalities should be put in place for any location data access without a court order... And your location should never be allowed to be sold or shared with any non court approved third party. It really is that serious and if the public had the bandwidth to be concerned over another issue, maybe something would change.
Who knows, maybe all the public needs to take it seriously are some real life examples of location data being used illegally...
Or "crimes". (Stay away from windows.)
I do really value my privacy but the problem is one doesn't control this very much.
Recently in Holland one of the major ISPs got breached and 6 million customers got their data leaked. This is something you can't take control as a customer and you're not going to move every time this happens.
Also, not too long ago we had this big book that contained everyone's address unless they opted out, just saying. Was even delivered for free yearly.
If we are talking about some sandom terrorist or something like that, yes.
But sometimes it's more personal despitethe fact that you did nothing wrong objectevly.
Jealocity (you got a girl and her ex. took it too close to heart), envy, disputes in an alterd stated (drunk figh). Etc.
My uncle (mother's side) has a schizophrenia and constantly threatens to find someone to kill me and my entire family (including his sister of course).
For example, do you have information obtained from illegal surveillance technology to know of an illegal activity happening in a house? Well, why not just ask very forcefully of someone facing inflated jail time, whether they happen to remember… after thinking really hard about it… having seen that illegal activity in that particular house they definitely have been in, to get the warrant approved by a judge.
It would be another matter if that was tracking a nuclear submarine...
I can't imagine with the satellite image and compute we have it would be difficult at all to know the real_time +- 30min location of any carrier by maybe the top 5-10 states, even at night.
The earth is vast, but once you pinpoint a carrier, a simple software loop should be able to track it for ever (those carrier do not move fast).
I cannot imagine this being remotely difficult for a state to have a constant pin on every large carriers sailing on earth. There even might be some civilian apps for that too.
But again, Strava and other connected + geolocation apps have been an issue for military personnel in general.
Most people here are tech savvy and understand VPNs, location sharing in apps, privacy agreeements, metadata in shared/posted JPEG files, etc but the episode I mentioned is like 20 minutes & provides maybe 100 different things you can do to reduce your footprint & increase your security while traveling abroad.
According to her, the biggest threats were fitness apps & dating apps (both of which are mentioned heavily here in the comments)
...until there was an active shooter and they couldn't call for help.
so they did away with that and started allowing phones.
personally hate there are too many vested interests working against the common sense that people should own and control their devices, which could prevent nonsense.
How were such situations managed before 1990?
So they are all at risk.
Clearly we're not learning from our mistakes...
I have seen more concerning things being revealed like locations of secret bases, and even internal building maps by looking at troops' WiFi. but those are secret places.
The idea that the public profile is the problem is ludicrous. The French military should have a problem with any geolocation data about its deployed sailors ever leaving its own networks.